Clinical care is based on information sharing across multiple care roles, including physician, nurse, patient, family, etc., to coordinate care. In many settings today, there is an overload of care information that may not be known to all members of the team, may not be relevant at a given decision point, or is relevant and is not known to the decision member at the time of decision.
Further, the care team is generally mobile and not physically looking at data represented in a central administration system for the patient of interest, such as EMRs (Electronic Medical Records) stored in a central server of a hospital, at the decision time. This creates an environment where errors are made due to incomplete knowledge of existing data, and workflow is impeded as the user needs to “drill” into the vast EMR to get the data, and timely collaboration with the rest of the care team delays good decision making and timely and correct care plan.
Patient monitoring devices (herein also called patient monitors) are contributing to this workflow today as measurement devices of vital signs and providing alarming and scoring based on the captured vital signs. In case a caregiver decides to visit a patient, vital signs, alarms and scores are available for review.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,600,421 discloses a system to automatically locally control a device according to preferences of a user entering a local area of the device from a remote area. The system provides a sensor generating measurement information based upon a patient parameter measured by the sensor and a processor managing local output of the measurement information according to automatically detected control signals locally and wirelessly transmitted from a transmitter entering a local area of the sensor from a remote area. The control signals include identification of a user and the transmitter travels with the user entering the local area of the sensor from a remote area so that the processor can manage local output of the measurement information according to stored preferences of the user. The processor can also control patient parameter measurements according to the preferences of the user.
WO 2006/051464 A1 (US 2009/0231124A1) discloses a wireless patient point-of-care network including a plurality of medical devices each with a wireless communication interface. Each medical device is configured to provide at least one medical service to a patient. A patient identification device is associated with the patient. The patient identification device includes a wireless communication interface in communication with the wireless communication interfaces of the medical devices. The patient identification device performs a patient identification service that wirelessly associates the medical devices with the patient.